Shadowings

by Lafcadio Hearn

  1 These syllables, forming a sort of special chorus, are simply onomatopes; intended to represent the sound of sandalled feet running at utmost speed.

  2 These onomatopes, chanted by all the dancers together in chorus, with appropriate gesture, represent the sound of the ferryman's single oar, or scull, working upon its wooden peg. The syllables have no meaning in themselves.

  1 This legend forms the subject of several Japanese dramas, both ancient and modern. The original story is that a Buddhist priest, called Anchin, having rashly excited the affection of a maiden named Kiyohimé, and being, by reason of his vows, unable to wed her, sought safety from her advances in flight. Kiyohimé, by the violence of her frustrated passion, therewith became transformed into a fiery dragon; and in that shape she pursued the priest to the temple called Dōjōji, in Kumano (modern Kishū), where he tried to hide himself under the great temple-bell. But the dragon coiled herself round the bell, which at once became red-hot, so that the body of the priest was totally consumed.

  In this rude ballad Kiyohimé figures only as the daughter of an innkeeper,—the Chōja, or rich man of his village; while the priest Anchin is changed into a Yamabushi. The Yamabushi are, or at least were, wandering priests of the strange sect called Shugendo,—itinerant exorcists and diviners, professing both Shinto and Buddhism. Of late years their practices have been prohibited by law; and a real Yamabushi is now seldom to be met with.

  The temple Dōjōji is still a famous place of pilgrimage. It is situated not far from Gobō, on the western coast of Kishū. The incident of Anchin and the dragon is said to have occurred in the early part of the tenth century.

  1 Lit.:—"that affinity as-for, ink-and-paper-soaked-like affinity."

  1 A wooden lath, bearing Buddhist texts, planted above graves. For a full account of the sotoba see my Exotics and Retrospectives: "The Literature of the Dead."

  1 In the original:—Hito no omoi wa osoroshi mono yo!—("how fearful a thing is the thinking of a person!"). The word omoi, used here in the sense of "longing," refers to the weird power of Seiza's dying wish to see his sweetheart. Even after his burial, this longing has the strength to burst open the tomb.

  —In the old English ballad of "William and Marjorie" (see Child: vol. ii. p. 151) there is also a remarkable fancy about the opening and closing of a grave:—

  She followed him high, she followed him low,

  Till she came to yon churchyard green;

  And there the deep grave opened up.

  And young William he lay down.

  2 With this episode compare the close of the English ballad "Sweet William's Ghost" (Child: vol. ii., page 148):—

  "O stay, my only true love, stay!"

  The constant Margaret cried:

  Wan grew her cheeks; she closed her een,

  Stretched her soft limbs, and died.

  1 A chō is about one fifteenth of a mile.

  Fantasies

  . . . Vainly does each, as he glides,

  Fable and dream

  Of the lands which the River of Time

  Had left ere he woke on its breast,

  Or shall reach when his eyes have

  been closed.

  Matthew Arnold

  Noctilucæ

  Noctilucæ

  THE moon had not yet risen; but the vast of the night was all seething with stars, and bridged by a Milky Way of extraordinary brightness. There was no wind; but the sea, far as sight could reach, was running in ripples of fire,—a vision of infernal beauty. Only the ripplings were radiant (between them was blackness absolute);—and the luminosity was amazing. Most of the undulations were yellow like candle-flame; but there were crimson lampings also,—and azure, and orange, and emerald. And the sinuous flickering of all seemed, not a pulsing of many waters, but a laboring of many wills,—a fleeting conscious and monstrous,—a writhing and a swarming incalculable, as of dragon-life in some depth of Erebus.

  And life indeed was making the sinister splendor of that spectacle—but life infinitesimal, and of ghostliest delicacy,—life illimitable, yet ephemeral, flaming and fading in ceaseless alternation over the whole round of waters even to the sky-line, above which, in the vaster abyss, other countless lights were throbbing with other spectral colors.

  Watching, I wondered and I dreamed. I thought of the Ultimate Ghost revealed in that scintillation tremendous of Night and Sea;—quickening above me, in systems aglow with awful fusion of the past dissolved, with vapor of the life again to be;—quickening also beneath me, in meteor-gushings and constellations and nebulosities of colder fire,—till I found myself doubting whether the million ages of the sun-star could really signify, in the flux of perpetual dissolution, anything more than the momentary sparkle of one expiring noctiluca.

  Even with the doubt, the vision changed. I saw no longer the sea of the ancient East, with its shudderings of fire, but that Flood whose width and depth and altitude are one with the Night of Eternity,—the shoreless and timeless Sea of Death and Birth. And the luminous haze of a hundred millions of suns,—the Arch of the Milky Way,—was a single smouldering surge in the flow of the Infinite Tides.

  Yet again there came a change. I saw no more that vapory surge of suns; but the living darkness streamed and thrilled about me with infinite sparkling; and every sparkle was beating like a heart,—beating out colors like the tints of the sea-fires. And the lampings of all continually flowed away, as shivering threads of radiance, into illimitable Mystery. . . .

  Then I knew myself also a phosphor-point,—one fugitive floating sparkle of the measureless current;—and I saw that the light which was mine shifted tint with each changing of thought. Ruby it sometimes shone, and sometimes sapphire: now it was flame of topaz; again, it was fire of emerald. And the meaning of the changes I could not fully know. But thoughts of the earthly life seemed to make the light burn red; while thoughts of supernal being,—of ghostly beauty and of ghostly bliss,—seemed to kindle ineffable rhythms of azure and of violet.

  But of white lights there were none in all the Visible. And I marvelled.

  Then a Voice said to me:—

  "The White are of the Altitudes. By the blending of the billions they are made. Thy part is to help to their kindling. Even as the color of thy burning, so is the worth of thee. For a moment only is thy quickening; yet the light of thy pulsing lives on: by thy thought, in that shining moment, thou becomest a Maker of Gods."

  A Mystery of Crowds

  A Mystery of Crowds

  WHO has not at some time leaned over the parapet of a bridge to watch the wrinklings and dimplings of the current below,—to wonder at the trembling permanency of surface-shapes that never change, though the substance of them is never for two successive moments the same? The mystery of the spectacle fascinates; and it is worth thinking about. Symbols of the riddle of our own being are those shuddering forms. In ourselves likewise the substance perpetually changes with the flow of the Infinite Stream; but the shapes, though ever agitated by various inter-opposing forces, remain throughout the years.

  And who has not been fascinated also by the sight of the human stream that pours and pulses through the streets of some great metropolis? This, too, has its currents and counter-currents and eddyings,—all strengthening or weakening according to the tide-rise or tide-ebb of the city's sea of toil. But the attraction of the greater spectacle for us is not really the mystery of motion: it is rather the mystery of man. As outside observers we are interested chiefly by the passing forms and faces,—by their intimations of personality, their suggestions of sympathy or repulsion. We soon cease to think about the general flow. For the atoms of the human current are visible to our gaze: we see them walk, and deem their movements sufficiently explained by our own experience of walking. And, nevertheless, the motions of the visible individual are more mysterious than those of the always invisible molecule of water.—I am not forgetting the truth that all forms of motion are ultimately incomprehensible: I am referring only to the fact that our co
mmon relative knowledge of motions, which are supposed to depend upon will, is even less than our possible relative knowledge of the behavior of the atoms of a water-current.

  Every one who has lived in a great city is aware of certain laws of movement which regulate the flow of population through the more crowded thoroughfares. (We need not for present purposes concern ourselves about the complex middle-currents of the living river, with their thunder of hoofs and wheels: I shall speak of the side-currents only.) On either footpath the crowd naturally divides itself into an upward and a downward stream. All persons going in one direction take the right-hand side; all going in the other direction take the left-hand side. By moving with either one of these two streams you can proceed even quickly; but you cannot walk against it: only a drunken or insane person is likely to attempt such a thing. Between the two currents there is going on, by reason of the pressure, a continual self-displacement of individuals to left and right, alternately,—such a yielding and swerving as might be represented, in a drawing of the double-current, by zigzag medial lines ascending and descending. This constant yielding alone makes progress possible: without it the contrary streams would quickly bring each other to a standstill by lateral pressure. But it is especially where two crowd-streams intersect each other, as at street-angles, that this systematic self-displacement is worthy of study. Everybody observes the phenomenon; but few persons think about it. Whoever really thinks about it will discover that there is a mystery in it,—a mystery which no individual experience can fully explain.

  In any thronged street of a great metropolis thousands of people are constantly turning aside to left or right in order to pass each other. Whenever two persons walking in contrary directions come face to face in such a press, one of three things is likely to happen:—Either there is a mutual yielding,—or one makes room for the other,—or else both, in their endeavor to be accommodating, step at once in the same direction, and as quickly repeat the blunder by trying to correct it, and so keep dancing to and fro in each other's way,—until the first to perceive the absurdity of the situation stands still, or until the more irritable actually pushes his vis-à-vis to one side. But these blunders are relatively infrequent": all necessary yielding, as a rule, is done quickly and correctly.

  Of course there must be some general law regulating all this self-displacement,—some law in accord with the universal law of motion in the direction of least resistance. You have only to watch any crowded street for half an hour to be convinced of this. But the law is not easily found or formulated: there are puzzles in the phenomenon.

  If you study the crowd-movement closely, you will perceive that those encounters in which one person yields to make way for the other are much Jess common than those in which both parties give way. But a little reflection will convince you that, even in cases of mutual yielding, one person must of necessity yield sooner than the other,—though the difference in time of the impulse-manifestation should be—as it often is—altogether inappreciable. For the sum of character, physical and psychical, cannot be precisely the same in two human beings. No two persons can have exactly equal faculties of perception and will, nor exactly similar qualities of that experience which expresses itself in mental and physical activities. And therefore in every case of apparent mutual yielding, the yielding must really be successive, not simultaneous. Now although what we might here call the "personal equation" proves that in every case of mutual yielding one individual necessarily yields sooner than the other, it does not at all explain the mystery of the individual impulse in cases where the yielding is not mutual;—it does not explain why you feel at one time that you are about to make your vis-à-vis give place, and feel at another time that you must yourself give place. What originates the feeling?

  A friend once attempted to answer this question by the ingenious theory of a sort of eye-duel between every two persons coming face to face in a street-throng; but I feel sure that his theory could account for the psychological facts in scarcely half-a-dozen of a thousand such encounters. The greater number of people hurrying by each other in a dense press rarely observe faces: only the disinterested idler has time for that. Hundreds actually pass along the street with their eyes fixed upon the pavement. Certainly it is not the man in a hurry who can guide himself by ocular snap-shot views of physiognomy;—he is usually absorbed in his own thoughts. . . . I have studied my own case repeatedly. While in a crowd I seldom look at faces; but without any conscious observation I am always able to tell when I should give way, or when my vis-à-vis is going to save me that trouble. My knowledge is certainly intuitive—a mere knowledge of feeling; and I know not with what to compare it except that blind faculty by which, in absolute darkness, one becomes aware of the proximity of bulky objects without touching them. And my intuition is almost infallible. If I hesitate to obey it, a collision is the invariable consequence.

  Furthermore, I find that whenever automatic, or at least semi-conscious, action is replaced by reasoned action—in plainer words, whenever I begin to think about my movements—I always blunder. It is only while I am thinking of other matters,—only while I am acting almost automatically,—that I can thread a dense crowd with ease. Indeed, my personal experience has convinced me that what pilots one quickly and safely through a thick press is not conscious observation at all, but unreasoning, intuitive perception. Now intuitive action of any kind represents inherited knowledge, the experience of past lives,—in this case the experience of past lives incalculable.

  Utterly incalculable. . . . Why do I think so? Well, simply because this faculty of intuitive self-direction in a crowd is shared by man with very inferior forms of animal being,—evolutional proof that it must be a faculty immensely older than man. Does not a herd of cattle, a herd of deer, a flock of sheep, offer us the same phenomenon of mutual yielding? Or a flock of birds—gregarious birds especially: crows, sparrows, wild pigeons? Or a shoal of fish? Even among insects—bees, ants, termites—we can study the same law of intuitive self-displacement. The yielding, in all these cases, must still represent an inherited experience unimaginably old. Could we endeavor to retrace the whole course of such inheritance, the attempt would probably lead us back, not only to the very beginnings of sentient life upon this planet, but further,—back into the history of non-sentient substance,—back even to the primal evolution of those mysterious tendencies which are stored up in the atoms of elements. Such atoms we know of only as points of multiple resistance,—incomprehensible knittings of incomprehensible forces. Even the tendencies of atoms doubtless represent accumulations of inheritance—but here thought checks with a shock at the eternal barrier of the Infinite Riddle.

  Gothic Horror

  Gothic Horror

  I

  LONG before I had arrived at what catechisms call the age of reason, I was frequently taken, much against my will, to church. The church was very old; and I can see the interior of it at this moment just as plainly as I saw it forty years ago, when it appeared to me like an evil dream. There I first learned to know the peculiar horror that certain forms of Gothic architecture can inspire. . . . I am using the word "horror" in a classic sense,—in its antique meaning of ghostly fear.

  On the very first day of this experience, my child-fancy could place the source of the horror. The wizened and pointed shapes of the windows immediately terrified me. In their outline I found the form of apparitions that tormented me in sleep;—and at once I began to imagine some dreadful affinity between goblins and Gothic churches. Presently, in the tall doorways, in the archings of the aisles, in the ribbings and groinings of the roof, I discovered other and wilder suggestions of fear. Even the façade of the organ,—peaking high into the shadow above its gallery,—seemed to me a frightful thing. . . . Had I been then suddenly obliged to answer the question, "What are you afraid of?" I should have whispered, "Those points!" I could not have otherwise explained the matter: I only knew that I was afraid of the "points."

  Of course the real enigma of what I fe
lt in that church could not present itself to my mind while I continued to believe in goblins. But long after the age of superstitious terrors, other Gothic experiences severally revived the childish emotion in so startling a way as to convince me that childish fancy could not account for the feeling. Then my curiosity was aroused; and I tried to discover some rational cause for the horror. I read many books, and asked many questions; but the mystery seemed only to deepen.

  Books about architecture were very disappointing. I was much less impressed by what I could find in them than by references in pure fiction to the awfulness of Gothic art,—particularly by one writer's confession that the interior of a Gothic church, seen at night, gave him the idea of being inside the skeleton of some monstrous animal; and by a far-famed comparison of the windows of a cathedral to eyes, and of its door to a great mouth, "devouring the people." These imaginations explained little; they could not be developed beyond the phase of vague intimation: yet they stirred such emotional response that I felt sure they had touched some truth. Certainly the architecture of a Gothic cathedral offers strange resemblances to the architecture of bone; and the general impression that it makes upon the mind is an impression of life. But this impression or sense of life I found to be indefinable,—not a sense of any life organic, but of a life latent and daemonic. And the manifestation of that life I felt to be in the pointing of the structure.

  Attempts to interpret the emotion by effects of altitude and gloom and vastness appeared to me of no worth; for buildings loftier and larger and darker than any Gothic cathedral, but of a different order of architecture,—Egyptian, for instance,—could not produce a like impression. I felt certain that the horror was made by something altogether peculiar to Gothic construction, and that this something haunted the tops of the arches.